“And that,” said Frederick. “That will put the stars within reach.”
“We won’t be able to go faster than light,” said Hannoken. He waved one hand to dismiss that shortcoming of the Q-drive. “But close enough so time dilation will make the trip seem short. No lifetimes on the way.”
“Except back home,” said Donna Rose.
Hannoken looked startled, as if he had never dreamed that a bot, an animated plant, could even begin to grasp the complexities of relativity. “That’s right,” he said. “If we were to go very far, there wouldn’t be much point in coming home. We would be long forgotten.”
“You sound like you intend to go along,” said Renny.
“If I’m still here when the time comes. I wouldn’t miss it.”
“If you leave for good, though,” said Donna Rose. “Won’t you need something bigger than a spaceship? Even something bigger than this Station?”
Hannoken nodded and pointed toward one corner of his picture window. “There,” he said. “Athena, magnify.” His office computer system obeyed the order and the window revealed itself as much more than a mere window. A small frame popped into place around a tiny speck, and frame and speck enlarged until the speck was clearly the fat disk of a distant habitat. There was no indication of whether it was Hugin or Munin. “We’ll need something more like that. And in fact we have our eyes on a certain asteroid. We’ve already named it Gypsy. There are over twenty thousand of us here in orbit, and it would hold us all with room to grow. If the Q-drive tests pan out, then we’ll begin to make more solid plans. We’ll have to hollow it out first.”
“That will take a while,” said Frederick.
“We have time.”
Renny growled. “Not as much as you think.”
“Hmmph,” Hannoken snorted. “We haven’t even tried the drive yet, except on drones. Maybe we will use you for the test pilot. We still don’t know it won’t scramble the passengers’ brains or genes or anatomies.” He paused. “Want to see the test ship?”
A little later, Frederick was fighting the urge to vomit while Donna Rose looked at him with an expression he could only take as amusement. She didn’t get spacesick, whether they were free-falling within an enclosed spacecraft or, as they had just done, passing through the low-gee core of a rotating space station, riding a taxi that was little more than a tank of compressed air attached to a plastic bubble, and stepping aboard a spherical satellite station, much smaller than Probe Station itself. “We keep everything that might be hazardous at arm’s length,” Hannoken had explained as he used his caprine legs to propel himself to a suitable vantage point within a cavernous construction bay. He had halted his flight by grabbing a cable with one hand and swinging to a stop.
Donna Rose followed the Director, one arm wrapped around Renny’s middle. A moment later, Frederick won the struggle to control his stomach and joined them.
The cable to which their hands anchored them was one of many that formed a spiderwebby maze that secured a bundle of cylinders in the center of the bay. The half-dozen cylinders on the outside of the bundle were dome-capped tubes about 10 meters long. Projecting from their middle was a somewhat longer cylinder whose bulging tip bore an access hatch and a row of three portholes. Painted beneath the ports was the ship’s name, Quoi.
“Not fuel tanks,” said Arlan Michaels. Director Hannoken had introduced the short, slender man as the head of the project, a physicist and engineer. Now he held to a nearby cable, facing them, holding himself carefully upright to their point of view, while he described the center of his life. Grease streaked his blonde hair and emphasized the strong Oriental cast to his features. He shifted his grip on the cable from one hand to the other. “Reaction mass,” he said now. “Powdered moon rock. The Q-drive vaporizes it to make a high-energy plasma. It’s vastly more powerful than anything we’ve ever had before.”
The ship was much smaller than anything designed to claw its way out of a gravity well, even one as shallow as the Moon’s. Yet it was also larger than orbital transfer vehicles like the shuttle that had carried Frederick, Donna Rose, and Renny between Nexus and Probe Stations.
Michaels led them around the ship, pointing at detail after detail of its structure. “If it works the way we hope it will,” he said. “This thing has the reaction mass to go to Mars and back in less than a week. It could even land there, a classic tail-down landing. A bigger model could even land on Earth.”
“The drive’s in the central cylinder?” asked Frederick. They had reached the swollen nose of the spacecraft.
“It takes up most of it,” said Michaels. He pointed at what they could see through the portholes. “That’s why the pilot has so little room.”
Frederick had once visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. There he had seen a Mercury capsule that had carried one of the first men to leave Earth’s atmosphere. The Q-ship gave its pilot very little more room to move about.
“It wouldn’t be too tight for me,” said Renny. His tail was wagging.
“But you’re not going,” said Frederick. “That was just a ruse.”
“Here’s the pilot now,” said Alvar Hannoken. Ricocheting toward them, her hands shifting smoothly from cable to cable as she propelled and steered, was the shuttle pilot who had delivered Frederick and his companions to Probe Station. “Lois McAlois.”
The pilot landed palms down on the nose of her ship. “We’ve met,” she said. Then she slapped the nearest port. “See why I’m keeping my stumps?” she said to Renny. “For a while anyway. It’s the only way I can fit in there halfway comfortably.”
“If it works,” said Michaels. “If it works, we’ll build the bigger model I mentioned.”
“And I’ll let the gengineers at me.”
“What if it doesn’t work?” asked Donna Rose.
Lois simply shrugged. Michaels said, “That’s a chance we take. She takes. But she volunteered.”
“Why?” asked Renny.
She shrugged again. “We needed someone. I’ve got the training. I happened to fit the box. And we all wanted to see this thing work. It will mean so much to everyone.”
Renny chuffed as if he were trying not to bark. “I suppose I could fit in there with you.”
Lois smiled at the big-headed German shepherd and opened her mouth as if to speak, but Michaels beat her to it. “Uh-uh,” he said. “We only need one test pilot.”
“I’ve heard a lot,” said Frederick, “about what this thing will be able to do if it works. But how does it work?”
Michaels’ face showed some relief at the change of subject. “Do you know?” he asked. “That a vacuum can produce particles spontaneously, out of nothing?” Hardly waiting for Frederick’s nod and Donna Rose’s puzzled look, he continued: “They come in matter-antimatter pairs, so there’s no net production of matter, and they usually annihilate each other immediately. This can yield energy, though normally in vanishingly small amounts. What we’ve done…Well, lab work here at the Station turned up a way to ‘stress’ space and make the necessary quantum fluctuations much more likely.”
“Blew the wall out of a lab,” said Lois. “And vaporized the researcher.”
“Fortunately, his work was in the computer,” said Hannoken.
Michaels nodded. “We can get enough energy that way to run the Q-ship. That’s what the Q stands for: quantum fluctuation. Unfortunately, the ‘stress’ alters quantum probabilities in many ways, not just in the drive but in the whole ship, and even for some distance around it. Lois? Would you turn the stressor on? Keep it low.”
He turned in the air of the construction bay until he faced the wall a few meters away. “No blast at all,” he said. “We’re safe.” Frederick noticed a square of dark blue fabric on the wall. On it, as unmoving as if they were glued in place, were six large dice and a lidded bucket. “Velcro,” said Michaels as he swung toward the wall. “Watch.”
With a rapid series of ripping sounds, he peeled the bucket and th
e dice from the fabric holding patch. He put the dice in the bucket, held the lid in place with one hand, and shook. Then he hurled the dice toward the fabric. When they struck, they froze in place.
“Four threes,” said Frederick. He sounded surprised. The next three throws produced five fours, three sixes and three ones, and six twos. When Michaels had Lois turn off the Q-drive and rejoin them, the throws became more mixed.
“You’re warping probability,” said Donna Rose.
Michaels nodded and tossed her a Velcro-coated die. “Right. And the probability ‘warps’ will be much stronger when the drive is going full blast. They may even be strong enough to affect living matter. To cause cancer, or to cure it. To mutate genes, or…” He shrugged. “Though they don’t seem to hurt mice. On the other hand, the pilot—and eventually passengers—will be exposed for much longer times.”
“On the third hand,” said Lois. “We have great hopes for the warps.”
“Tunneling?” asked Frederick. Arlan Michaels grinned at him, appreciating the sign of understanding. “We need more control, but yes,” he said. “Subatomic particles can appear, quite suddenly and without moving through the intervening distance, on the other side of a barrier. They have a certain probability of being anywhere, and sometimes they are. Larger objects have such probabilities too, but they are infinitesimal. Useless. We hope to make them larger, and then…”
“The stars,” said Donna Rose. “Faster than light travel.”
“A warp drive,” said Renny.
“Exactly,” said Lois McAlois.
“But we do need control,” said Michaels. “So far, all we can do is warp the probabilities in a general way. That’s enough for generating energy, but it won’t let us pick a destination or a distance. And we wouldn’t want to leap several light years in some random direction. We have to be able to steer.”
Donna Rose looked at the die he had given her. She turned it over in her hands. She reached out and pressed it back onto the fabric that had held it first. “Steering doesn’t matter,” she said quietly. “Not if all you want to do is flee, to go elsewhere.”
“The Engineers,” said Frederick quietly, though he would have been surprised if Michaels were not aware of what was happening on Earth.
“Yes.” The physicist nodded his head. His expression was sympathetic, his tone wry. “But we would like to be able to test such a drive and get word bout the results back. If we can’t know whether it works, using a tunneling drive to flee the Engineers might amount to no more than an expensive way to commit suicide.”
“Huh!” Renny’s exclamation was nearly a woof. “Staying within their reach might be cheaper, but it would still be suicide.”
“It can’t be that bad, can it?” Director Hannoken’s face and voice both seemed skeptical, and Frederick remembered what he had read of history: In the twentieth century, when the German Nazis had been slaughtering Jews and other minorities by the millions, the world had refused to admit that such things could happen. Only when the death camps had been liberated by opposing troops had the evidence become inescapable. And before another generation was past, scholars had been writing books that claimed to prove that the death camps were only propaganda: There had been no poison-gas “showers,” no ovens, no mass shootings, no mass graves, no multiple decimations—decimation meant the death of one in ten, and fewer than that had survived—of the innocent.
The news reports, he thought, were clear enough. No one would fake veedo footage such as that which had shown the attack on Donna Rose’s dorm in the city park. And Hannoken had said the Station got the news, had offered her sanctuary when Frederick called her a refugee, had suggested that more bots might seek freedom in the sky. Walt Massaba had indicated that they would be made welcome to the extent that the Station—perhaps even all the stations in orbit around the planet—had the room and resources to support them, and surely his words had been directed by his boss.
Had Hannoken forgotten? Or did he think that what was going on on Earth was nothing more than the sort of persecution American blacks had endured for more than a century after the Civil War? Not the program of extermination Renny had just suggested?
* * *
CHAPTER 10
Alice Belle and her two friends were a cluster of green on the side of the street, staring across the stream of Roachsters, Hoppers, and Armadons, Macks and Bernies and coveralled pedestrians that was the city’s traffic. For her that green was the green of long leaves coiled around her torso. For the Nickers, it was the green of genetically modified skin. For all three, it was the green of chlorophyll, the green of grass and tree that stand unmoving while the noisy tides of animal life and conflict flow past. Brighter colors entered the picture with Alice Belle’s blossoms, Sheila Nickers’ feathered scalp and ornamented cheek and jaw bones, both her and her husband’s patterned clothing.
“There it is.” Alice Belle gestured toward the building across the way.
There was nothing about the building’s exterior to distinguish it except that it bore no floater blisters and on its roof there was a small greenhouse. It did not have, as some buildings did, the slowly pulsing green bulge upon its roof that was a Bellows, part plant, part animal, a lung-like supplier of warmed or cooled, dried or moistened air. Central heating remained, but mechanical air-conditioning was an extinct luxury.
Like many of the city’s buildings, it was an old structure of reinforced concrete. Once its window openings had been sealed with glass against the outside air. Many decades ago, the seals had been broken and more traditional windows had been installed, ones that could be opened to permit cooling cross-breezes or closed to conserve heat. The result was a gridwork of window frames and sills to which clung honeysuckle vines enough to add a layer of cooling shade.
“I like it already,” said Sheila Nickers. “It looks like home.” Many of the windows were closed off by louvered grills, but she was able to point at one, another, another, that were not. The lighting that glowed within was far brighter than in most of the city’s apartments.
Three concrete steps led up to a flagstone platform and the building’s entrance, a pair of high glass doors. Mounted above and behind the doors was a camera. Beyond them sat a pair of computers, one bioform rooted in a pot and one electronic device. “Image recognizers,” said Alice Belle as she stepped into the camera’s field of view. “They back each other up. The bioform’s immune to power failures, the other one to poisons or diseases. If they both fail, steel shutters fall down to cover the glass.”
Sam Nickers gave the bot a sidelong glance. Paranoia? But what had happened to them, to him and Sheila? What had happened to those bots who lived in the dormitory in the park? Were similar outrages happening elsewhere, in other cities, other nations? Disquieting rumors suggested that the news reports of violence were being downplayed, and that some outrages were being hushed up entirely.
He looked up at the slot that held the shutters and thought the steel looked thick enough to stop bare-handed rioters but not the impact of even a small Mack truck. But he said nothing as the doors’ lock clicked, Alice Belle pushed, and they entered. “We’ll give them a look at you later on,” she was saying. “The bioform will need a sniff as well.”
The entranceway smelled of soil and growing things, and a few feet past the doors the flagstones gave way to bare dirt. Alice Belle removed her shoes. “You don’t have to,” she said. “But we do like the feel of dirt on our feet.”
“So do we,” said Sheila, and she and Sam followed suit. “Though we don’t get many chances.”
To himself alone, Sam smiled. He hadn’t gone barefoot on bare dirt since he had been a sprout. He remembered that the luxuriously cool feel of soil on his feet had been marred by the awkward, sometimes sharp projections of twigs and rocks. When he realized that such things were nearly absent from the soil that covered this building’s floors, he let his smile reach his face.
“Your place will be on the third floor.” An elevator took them
there, and Alice Belle led them along corridors whose doors, many of them open, exposed apartments whose carpets of soil swelled into mounds beneath bright lights. Honeysuckle vines crept over the sills of windows, both those open to the outdoor light and those blocked by louvers, and rooted in the soil. In some of the rooms they passed, mist was spraying from overhead pipes. A resident, stepping slowly across her apartment’s floor while her roots sifted through the soil like fingers searching through piles of coins, caught Sam’s eye. He paused to watch, and when he saw her roots heave a pebble to the surface, her green torso bend, and her hand pitch the small stone out the window, he understood why the soil was so soft and fine.
Alice Belle and Sheila retraced their steps to join him at the door. “Narcissus Joy,” said Alice Belle. “She works in our gengineering lab.”
A trio of bees hummed above Narcissus Joy’s scalp blossoms, creamy white with orange rims. She straightened, looked toward her visitors, and said, “Our new neighbors. May I help you?”
“They’re curious,” said Alice Belle. “They’ve never been here. No humans have. It’s all new to them.”
“Why do you…?” asked Sam with a gesture toward Narcissus Joy’s roots and the trail of sifted earth behind her.
“There’s no need, really,” the bot said gently. “It’s a way to think, to meditate.”
“Gengineering?” asked Sheila.
Narcissus Joy swung to point toward the window. “You see the honeysuckle? It’s as old as our kind, and the roots interconnect, everywhere. We use them as our grapevine, a way to communicate. And the humans think the vines are a nuisance.”
“BRA keeps releasing viruses to destroy them,” said Alice Belle. “And it’s a full-time job designing the genefixes to keep the vines alive. We need them badly. We depend on them.”
“Most people,” said Alice Belle. “They think we’re barely more than walking plants. Janitors and other menials.”
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